Join Dr Maureen Sier, Director of Interfaith Scotland and Frances Hume, Development Officer to find out more about Scottish Interfaith Week 2016 on Thursday 1st September at 4pm.

Dr Maureen Sier, Director of Interfaith Scotland and Frances Hume, Development Officer will share about Scottish Interfaith Week 2016 – what it is, why it is important, and what resources are available for teachers to mark the week in schools. Scottish Interfaith Week is taking place from 13th – 20th November. The week provides an opportunity to celebrate Scotland’s diversity and to plan events that bring people together to promote dialogue, understanding and co-operation between people of all faiths and none.

The theme of Scottish Interfaith Week this year is ‘Religion and the Media’, recognising the powerful effect that the media can have on people of different faiths. Maureen and Frances will outline resources available for teachers on this theme. They will also give an outline of the work of Interfaith Scotland including the variety of workshops that they offer in schools.

The other day I saw Martin tweet a change. Google Drive will drop the ability to serve webpages soon so Martin has updated the setup to use GitHub. He also took the time to make the setup a lot more user friendly (if you have a github account and a very little experience with git).

The set up involves downloading your twitter archive from twitter. You then set up your GitHub Pages – Website. To this you push your downloaded archive, connect to Martin’s script and away you go. The local git stuff is just used to kick off the pages site, which then is updated from the script. It works a treat: My Twitter archive. I am not trying to replicate the instructions here, the set up page has that covered.

What I did wonder was if you could pull the updates back down locally. Sort of PESOS, but to my hard drive rather than own site. I guess it could go truly PESOS if I knew how to push it out to johnjohnston.info (thinks, maybe I do1).

1. As I wrote this I realise that git-ftp could do this. After configuring it in my local folder I added git ftp push to the script. This will push to my website, so My Twitter archive on johnjohnston.info. ↩

2. launchd seem to be thing to use instead of cron to run things periodically on a mac. Lingon simplifies creating and handling them. I’m using the old 2x version of Lingon, it seems to work.↩

Wow, what a long time since my last post. I’ve had an awfully busy summer working 2 jobs in my home village in preparation for my second year at the University of Dundee studying Primary Teaching. Although the majority of my summer holidays were taken up with work I managed to have the odd day […]

The following materials will be of interest to anyone who would like to explore connections between numeracy/mathematics and the world of work. It includes an interactive financial education resource, Money Talks, an article on how mathematics is used in the workplace from the Mathematics Association of America and Citizen Maths, a site for people who want to become more confident in using maths at work and in life. There are also links to the National Numeracy and Mathematics Hub, a virtual learning environment for all practitioners and a copy of the latest Numeracy and Mathematics Resource Guide.

The following materials will be of interest to anyone who would like to explore connections between numeracy/mathematics and the world of work. It includes an interactive financial education resource, Money Talks, an article on how mathematics is used in the workplace from the Mathematics Association of America and Citizen Maths, a site for people who want to become more confident in using maths at work and in life. There are also links to the National Numeracy and Mathematics Hub, a virtual learning environment for all practitioners and a copy of the latest Numeracy and Mathematics Resource Guide.

Credit for this post goes entirely to Bhagwad Park. What you read below is his solution; I’ve only re-written it slightly. His post can be read here.

I like WordPress. Well, okay, I love it. But sometimes it does weird things—like asking to connect via FTP if I want to install a new theme. WordPress doesn’t normally need to do this. The problem is that the PHP process in the background runs as Apache instead of the owner of the WordPress files. Here’s how to get it to work.

Open Terminal on your Mac (or use whatever SSH software you like) and type the following:

sudo chown -R www:www /Library/WebServer/Documents/Moodle

The first part of the path I’ve written here (/Library/WebServer/Documents) is the default folder and I’ve added the /Moodle because that’s what my folder is called which has all the files for Moodle. Yeah, original, isn’t it? If you’ve named your folder something else (or if you’ve changed the default location) you will need to type in the proper path.

‘chown’ allows you to change the owner of files or folders; -R means recursive (meaning that it is to be repeated for every sub directory and their files; www:www means we are changing the permission to www user and the www group (it’s a special system used for executing PHP processes).

Again, thanks to Bhagwad Park without whom I would have been pulling my hair out.

This week I did a welcome back assembly for my S4 year group. I had a lot to say. I decided against doing the usual ‘this year is massively important/pile on the pressure’ approach and instead to give a message about individuality. I asked them for feedback. It ranged from ‘hot’ (temperature in library) and ‘boring’ to ‘inspirational’, ‘helpful’ and ‘moving’.

So I think I made a difference to at least some. Here’s what I said:

I hope you had a lovely summer. Some of you may have not and that is difficult; we all expect holidays to be a time to relax, have fun.

The other day, I was asked this question – are you going to do one of those…., Mrs C??

And I thought about it. And I decided that maybe not. Because as I thought about it, I realised that maybe not all of you need to hear that message just now.

Some of you may well need the first approach just now. You may well need to be told that ‘this is an important year’…and get the proverbial kick up the backside

But others may KNOW THAT IT IS IMPORTANT AND HAVE KNOWN IT SINCE S1. Me telling you is unlikely to help and may indeed make things worse.

Each one of you in S4 is an individual and each one will have a slightly different aim this year:

Some of you, as you know from the PSE work we did on teenage brain, may be finding it hard to have any sort of plan and may struggle to think beyond tomorrow!!

It is the job of the adults in this school to help you keep going in the right direction.

Prelims are the ‘practice’ exams you do if you are doing National 5’s. They may also help you and your teachers decide whether you should do N4 or N5. And they can be useful if you get struck down with an illness during the actual N5 exams – for example if you get glandular fever, which can affect people of your age and may or may not be caused by snogging……..

Here is another example of how one bit of advice does not work for all people. This looks quite sensible. This is the poster of the week for S2 this week.

For some of you, who lack motivation and can ALWAYS find an excuse for not doing things (“I’m too tired!!”), this might be great!

If Mo Farah had given up when he was tired after 4 laps, he would not have gone on to win an Olympic gold. Equally, if he had given up when he fell over, he’d never have got the gold…….

BUT I was terrible at your age and at university for pushing myself TOO hard – always working until I was ‘finished’ and not listening to when I was tired. I was always worried that I wasn’t doing enough, that there were always more books to read and I nearly made myself ill. Some of you may be like me. In some (most) jobs, there is always more work you COULD do.

But fact we all know, if we go back to Mo Farah, that for athletes, training is all about pace. Not doing too much or too little, listening to your body and stopping when you are injured or tired. It is the MOST competitive thing but it is also a field where it is MOST important to know what YOU can do.

Tom Daly gave a good example in the Olympics of how things don’t always go to plan, even when we work our hardest. He got a bronze medal in the Olympics which is beyond what most of us in the room could even dream of! But he felt he had failed.

He gives an important message about how we can fall and get up again (like Mo), learn and try again.

In fact Tom Daly is a very interesting example of how hard it can sometimes be to keep going to achieve what we want:

He competed in the Bejing Olympics aged 14.

His father, Robert, died from a brain tumour on 27 May 2011, aged 40 when Tom was 17.

He was also bullied at school and actually moved school after the 2012 Olympics when people called him ‘Speedo boy.’

He took his GCSEs in small batches to fit around his diving commitments. He persuaded supermodel Kate Moss to pose for a recreation of an original portrait by David Hockney, as part of a GCSE photography project recreating great works of art, after meeting her on a photo shoot for the Italian version of Vogue.

He obtained one A and eight A* grades in his GCSEs

In 2012, he did A-level studies in mathematics, Spanish and photography. He received an A* in his photography A-level, and an A in his Spanish and maths A-levels.

In 2013 he came out and once again was the victim of horrific online homophobic bullying.

He is 22 and worth 4 million pounds.

Where are the people who were abusive now?

Another person recently who has spoken out about bullying is Nadiya Hussain. Last year’s Bake-off winner. Speaking on Desert Island Discs, she said she has experienced racist abuse throughout her life, had things thrown at her and been pushed and shoved.

She said: “I expect to be shoved or pushed or verbally abused because that happens. It’s been happening for years.”

Asked by host Kirsty Young how she reacted, she said she did not retaliate.

‘Be the better person’.

“I feel like there’s a dignity in silence, and I think if I retaliate to negativity with negativity, then we’ve evened out,” she said.

“And I don’t need to even that out because if somebody’s being negative, I need to be the better person.

This leads me to a message I want you all to hear in S4:

And if you are experiencing abuse or hurt from others, whilst I encourage you not to retaliate and to have dignity in silence, please DON’T suffer in silence. We will be doing more on this in S4 PSE this term as we look at hate crime.

Social Enterprise Academy, with support from Education Scotland and Bòrd na Gàidhlig, are delivering an Institute of Leadership and Management Award for teachers of Gaelic Education. The next Leadership Award for Gaelic Education will commence on 11 and 12 November 2016. If you wish to enrol for this award, or require more information, please contact kate@socialenterprise.academy.